An article in our student newspaper on Pinterest.com caught my eye this morning. It is described as an online pinboard for sharing photos, recipes, and other content. Content is shared when users pin content from someone else’s pinboard onto their own.

In this way, Pinterest is a bit like Tumblr or even Twitter in that content can echo around and be amplified as more users repost it. Interestingly, most (if not all) of the content is image-based. In some ways, this is limiting because a recipe is actually a picture of food that you can click on to get to the site that originally posted the recipe. In effect, Pinterest actually feels more like a different interface for photosharing websites like Flickr. There are lots of interesting boards that are pictures organized by color or by different topics.

Could Pinterest be useful to ESL students? Perhaps. It could provide a way for them to store and organize web content that can be shared within the classroom community. It’s very smooth and clean and the opportunity to interact with the site-wide community could be interesting. And the site terms and conditions prohibit nudity and hateful content, which can be reassuring for teachers. If a course is not using a web-based course management system, Pinterest could be a quick and interesting way to build a community that could generate some interesting discussion. But is it the next Big Thing? Probably not.